Christopher Beha’s new intellectual memoir, Why I Am Not an Atheist, could equally well have been titled Apologia pro vita sua. Not for nothing does the novelist and believer evoke the recently canonized saint in his book’s opening gambit: John Henry Newman’s spirit of patient, painstaking, gentle, but unrelenting inquiry pervades the entire text. So does the saint’s epistemic modesty. Beha carries out a Newmanesque service to the truth by identifying two strains of contemporary thought, scientific materialism and romantic idealism, and exploring why each once seemed plausible to him and continue to seem plausible to many respectable minds. By doing justice to these philosophical positions, not in mere popular formulations but in full-bore engagement with the thinkers behind them, Beha makes it possible for us to see how a serious thinker might grow beyond them.

In Why I Am Not an Atheist, Beha sets out not so much to tell us why he believes the two most common Western worldviews are false, as to tell us why he believes they are false. That is not to say that the book falls into a problematic subjectivism or perspectival relativism. On the contrary, it proceeds from a few bedrock convictions central to almost all forms of advanced human thought, Western or Eastern, theistic or not:

• Some sort of reality exists, either within or outside our minds.
• We can reliably know at least some of that reality through our senses and our intellects (however we conceive of the latter).
• Some knowable realities are visible (concrete, physical) and some are invisible (abstract, metaphysical). This remains true even outside of belief in a deity; many mathematical concepts remain abstract, even though they have reference to quantity, shape, and other properties that can be attributed to matter.
• Our knowledge of both the physical and the metaphysical cannot help but imply something about how we ought to conduct ourselves in relation to the visible world, including our own bodies and those of others. In other words, ethical right and wrong are among the abstract realities that exist.

Of course, there is much more to Christian reason and revelation than this. From a Christian perspective, you can start out from these premises and still wind up in some very tall weeds indeed. That is why many treatments of modern philosophy from a perspective of faith tend either to straw-man the arguments against Christian metaphysics or perform a kind of genetic-fallacy undercutting them, extrapolating wildly from modern thinkers’ positions to show how their godless conclusions are responsible for all the world’s current evils. Beha, admirably, does neither. Instead, giving the key figures behind scientific materialism and romantic idealism their due allows him to evaluate these worldviews on their own terms. And his evaluation reveals cracks in their edifices that hint at something stronger beneath: a prior condition upon which all their assertions rest but which both worldviews persist in denying. It is as though two windows of a house were to deny the existence of the ground on which the foundation was built.

Beha’s intellectual explorations eventually take him to where that ground of truth lies: the experiential fact of our having been created and continually held in being by a loving Creator, one who remains firmly and patiently bemused with all that can be said against Him, continuing to provide that prior condition with unconditional persistence. This is not where the search ever begins, though. That beginning is rooted in the lived experience of loving and being loved: put another way, the ultimate ground of intellectual search can’t be merely intellectual but must go beyond what the mind alone can hold. Once he accepted the reality of love as a starting point, Beha writes, “I could tell that my foundation was sound, I just wanted to know what was underfoot.”